Multiple places, as per usual for European peoples. There is nary a one that can claim a single origin for all the DNA in all the people who currently hold a passport from a particular nation, unless we are going to track it all back to the first Homo sapiens. You posted earlier:

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I think the Irish are mainly three parts:

1) Mesolithic Hunter/Gatherer (probably from the Continent through Britain)2) Neolithic Danubian Farmer (probably from Brittany and the Netherlands through Britain)3) Bronze Age Metallurgist (probably from the Balkans by way of the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay)

On #3, I believe some entered southeastern France and spread through the country to the Atlantic coast.

Mallory agrees with you on #1 and #2 and partly on #3. He feels that the Bell Beaker/metallurgy arrival involved community/family immigration from both Atlantic Europe and northern Britain. What I find really interesting is the evidence he lays out for a change in the Late BB period in Ireland, which I had suspected. (He does not say so, but I suspect that Late BB is when the earliest Celtic arrived in Ireland via Britain. It looks to me as though the early BB in Ireland came up the Atlantic coast from Portugal via Brittany and was associated with an Italo-Celtic dialect.)

Mallory is keener on the idea that Celtic arrived somewhat later, with the rise of hillforts c. 1000 BC.

What I like about Jim's approach is that he is very cautious and always outlines the problems and only presents probabilities. I think its a great book for people interested in the subject but who havent up to date material. It is essentially an archaeology book focussed on the populating of Ireland. The DNA part is token and essentially he stays well clear of it. I think he can see there are still a lot of leaps of faith in interpreting DNA through variance etc so he is characteristically cautious and dodges the issue. What you do get is a very good book lookng at archaeological evidence. I personally think he tells it how it is and when something is not clear he says so.

A few things stand out for me

1. He derives the Mesolithic Irish from northern Britain by boat through the area around the Isle of Man. What I found very dissapointing is he dodged the issue of where they came from before that. He just put in some stock padding about the Franco-Cantabrian refugia but in reality its far more complex than that as there is a long period between SW Europe in 14000BC and northern Britain in 8200BC. What was the route in between?

2. He pretty well derives the Irish farmers from a radiating of farmers from SE England where they were a few centuries older. They had to have come by boat with animals so Britain is pretty well the only scenario.

3. One of the main themes of the book is that Ireland and Britain were culturally almost always very similar and there was a constant flow of ideas, new material culture, new momuments, new pottery, new ritual idea etc between the too island that was vastily larger than with the continent. This seems to have been true through the entire Neolithic and Bronze Age c. 3800BC to 700BC. He paints a picture of the Irish Sea with a constant flow of people, ideas and material between the two island. He sees direct continental contact (not via Britain) as rare and perhaps not unsurprisingy, where it is implied, it points to NW France. This however is a minor aspect and his main theme is that Ireland and western Britain were joined at the hip throughout much of prehistory. The Bronze Age part of this is IMO likely to be connected with the heavy sharing of L21 subclades and clusters between the Irish and western Britain.

4. He is not a believe in Celts in Ireland until at least the later Bronze Age. I am not surprised he continues to argue that because he has already put this in print several times.

In general, I am in 100% agreement with him because he just puts the evidence out there and kind of leaves yourself to make up your mind. There are no real surprses. He does try and place the arrival of Celtic in Ireland as linked with the appearance of hillforts. Its possible but he only takes that link as far as Britain and he is clear about how tenious this is. Not impossible though. It comes over though as just one of a continous flow of links between the two island. That of course passes back the buck of Celticisation of the isles to Britain.

So, the Irish originated in Britain. Now we need to find someone to write a book telling us the origins of the Britons. Well, it will have to be someone believable.

Until then if anyone asks me where the Irish came from I'll tell them Britain. If they ask where they came from before they got to Britain, I'll tell them no one knows.

I don't know why, but I feel as if I haven't learned anything from this book and Mr. Mallory.

I think this is a somewhat of an overly simplistic view of some of the themes of the book.

You have to decide what you mean by Irish to start out with. If we are talking about the male lineages of Ireland I think that many of them probably reached Ireland via Britain. Just the geographic proximity and direction from the Near East and NE Africa indicates this is a strong possibility.

Genetically, England is full of L21, just like Ireland. Northern and northwestern France also has a lot of L21. England's L21 has greater diversity than Ireland's so that only supports the possibility.

Mallory is an archaeologist and apparently he thinks the archaeology supports a lot of migration from Britain to Ireland.

There certainly was movement the other direction too and there is a lot more to the Irish than just L21 male lineages....

but it is what it is.

BTW, the first Celtic speakers on Britain may not have been true Britons in the sense of being Brythonic speaking. The could have been archaic Q-Celtic speaking.

BTW, the first Celtic speakers on Britain may not have been true Britons in the sense of being Brythonic speaking. They could have been archaic Q-Celtic speaking.

That I think is a virtual certainty. No linguist thinks that P-Celtic is of the same age as Q-Celtic. Mallory is pushing for a later date than Bell Beaker for the arrival of Celtic in the British Isles because of the linguistic problems he sees with the earlier date. But there is a equally large problem with an Iron Age date. If Celtic arrived any time after the 6th century BC via Britain (who got it from Gaul) it would be P-Celtic (which is attested in Lepontic inscriptions from the 6th century.) So he goes for c. 1000 BC as about the latest time that linguists can picture P-Celtic splitting with Q-Celtic.

But his book actually provides the solution to the linguistic problems, though he doesn't make much of it.

Problem 1: the similarities between the Insular Celtic languages. Does this not indicate an Iron Age split to form Irish and Brythonic? In fact these similarities (including the word for "iron") could just as easily come from contact between the islands from the first arrival of an archaic Celtic to long after P-Celtic had been adopted in Britain, as some linguists have suggested. One of those contacts could be the P-Celtic speakers in eastern Ireland by the Roman period, the evidence for which Mallory takes a lot more seriously than many authors.

Problem 2: the lack of regional dialects in the earliest written form of Irish. Mallory provides a possible solution. One regional dialect of Irish Gaelic could have spread over Ireland at some point, pushing out both P-Celtic and other dialects of Gaelic.

My comment: And who more likely to have achieved this than his archetypal Irishman, Niall of the Nine Hostages? He and his people pushed out of western Ireland, where Gaelic could have survived against waves of P-Celtic incomers landing on the east coast. His descendants seem to have had a wide impact.

The Book should have been titled, "The Unknown Origins of the Irish". By saying the Irish originated in Britain without giving any origin of the British, then he is giving nothing.

If Mallory stated in his Book the path taken by each wave of people, such as they came from what is now The Netherlands and passed through Britain to what is now Liverpool and entered Ireland in the area that is now Dublin, we would have gotten something.

Does Mallory at any time state an area of the Continent as the origin of any wave of people into Ireland through Britain?

Also, what is the linguistic evidence of Q-Celtic in Britain before Ogham? Are there Q-Celtic place names in Britain?

Mallory does sketch in the familiar story of the retreat from the glaciers, followed by the repopulation of northern Europe from southern refuges. I don't know that it would be possible to be more exact on the wanderings of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who crossed the land-bridge to Britain and then (he deduces) across an almost land-bridge incorporating the now Isle of Man. Quite a bit of the evidence is now under water.

Likewise we have none too clear a path for the entry of the first farmers into the Isles, beyond some possible points of departure along the coast of what is now France. I had to almost throw up my hands, and I'm not the first. I'm prepared to link it to a trail of dairy farmers up the Danube, but there will be plenty of people complaining that I'm too bold.

Actually I think you would enjoy the book. Mallory has a delightful sense of humour.

Not that can be securely pegged to Q-Celtic, as far as I know. Wales and Cornwall are loaded with P-Celtic names, as you would expect. In the rest of England, river-names can be Celtic e.g. the several rivers Avon, from the same root word meaning "river" that gives us the Irish rivers Avonbeg, Avonmore and Awbeg. In Irish that is abhainn, in Welsh it is afon. There is a discussion of this name by Calvert Watkins, 'River' in Celtic and Indo-European, Ériu, Vol. 24, (1973), pp. 80-89, that is over my head frankly. The only bit I understand is "archaic".

Or river-names can be regarded as pre-Celtic but IE, such as the Don, West Yorkshire, which is from the same IE root meaning "water" or "river" as the Don and Danube running into the Black Sea. If we conclude (as I do) that the earliest IE speakers to arrive in Britain were Bell Beaker people, such IE pre-Celtic names would be bestowed by them while they were still speaking a language closer to IE than Celtic.

I presume that the Irish River Eske has the same etymology as the several British rivers Esk and Exe, from the root "isca", presumed to mean "water" or "river".

What I like about Jim's approach is that he is very cautious and always outlines the problems and only presents probabilities. I think its a great book for people interested in the subject but who havent up to date material. It is essentially an archaeology book focussed on the populating of Ireland. The DNA part is token and essentially he stays well clear of it. I think he can see there are still a lot of leaps of faith in interpreting DNA through variance etc so he is characteristically cautious and dodges the issue. What you do get is a very good book lookng at archaeological evidence. I personally think he tells it how it is and when something is not clear he says so.

A few things stand out for me

1. He derives the Mesolithic Irish from northern Britain by boat through the area around the Isle of Man. What I found very dissapointing is he dodged the issue of where they came from before that. He just put in some stock padding about the Franco-Cantabrian refugia but in reality its far more complex than that as there is a long period between SW Europe in 14000BC and northern Britain in 8200BC. What was the route in between?

2. He pretty well derives the Irish farmers from a radiating of farmers from SE England where they were a few centuries older. They had to have come by boat with animals so Britain is pretty well the only scenario.

3. One of the main themes of the book is that Ireland and Britain were culturally almost always very similar and there was a constant flow of ideas, new material culture, new momuments, new pottery, new ritual idea etc between the too island that was vastily larger than with the continent. This seems to have been true through the entire Neolithic and Bronze Age c. 3800BC to 700BC. He paints a picture of the Irish Sea with a constant flow of people, ideas and material between the two island. He sees direct continental contact (not via Britain) as rare and perhaps not unsurprisingy, where it is implied, it points to NW France. This however is a minor aspect and his main theme is that Ireland and western Britain were joined at the hip throughout much of prehistory. The Bronze Age part of this is IMO likely to be connected with the heavy sharing of L21 subclades and clusters between the Irish and western Britain.

4. He is not a believe in Celts in Ireland until at least the later Bronze Age. I am not surprised he continues to argue that because he has already put this in print several times.

In general, I am in 100% agreement with him because he just puts the evidence out there and kind of leaves yourself to make up your mind. There are no real surprses. He does try and place the arrival of Celtic in Ireland as linked with the appearance of hillforts. Its possible but he only takes that link as far as Britain and he is clear about how tenious this is. Not impossible though. It comes over though as just one of a continous flow of links between the two island. That of course passes back the buck of Celticisation of the isles to Britain.

Thanks for the informative comment.

Is the consensus now then, that the oldest male lineages in Britain and Ireland only go back as far as the Bronze Age (L21) and that hardly any y-dna lineages from the Neolithic or Mesolithic have survived to the modern day?

On the question of geographic origins, for the first farmers, it seems obvious that France is the general origin point and Brittany has been mentioned but clearly there would have been multiple waves and multiple origin points during the Neolithic.

Mallory does sketch in the familiar story of the retreat from the glaciers, followed by the repopulation of northern Europe from southern refuges. I don't know that it would be possible to be more exact on the wanderings of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who crossed the land-bridge to Britain and then (he deduces) across an almost land-bridge incorporating the now Isle of Man. Quite a bit of the evidence is now under water.

Likewise we have none too clear a path for the entry of the first farmers into the Isles, beyond some possible points of departure along the coast of what is now France. I had to almost throw up my hands, and I'm not the first. I'm prepared to link it to a trail of dairy farmers up the Danube, but there will be plenty of people complaining that I'm too bold.

Actually I think you would enjoy the book. Mallory has a delightful sense of humour.

I am learning much from your posts, thanks.

WRT the Danubian dairy farmers, is there a proposed route to the Isles after the Danube? Was it north via the Rhine or west into France, or something else. I did look at your site but couldn't find anything.

I realise that farming took a long time to spread through Europe to the Isles and obviously it wasn't a single wave of people. And presumably, the first farmers may have been replaced by later farmers who arrived by different routes.

I think it's safe to say that all arrivals to the Isles came directly from France or the low countries, unless they were much better sailors than we give them credit for.

If the West Asian percentages found in Autosomal tests represents the Danubian Farmers (which I think it does) than it seems as if they came along what is now the north of France, Belgium and The Netherlands. Some Autosomal results from The Netherlands show a higher West Asian score than others in Western Europe or the Isles. Cornwall scores also show a higher West Asian score.

I have a higher West Asian score than the Irish scores I've seen, although their are some Leinster testers who are close. I am also 25 French-Canadian with a large amount of ancestry from Brittany which I believe would have similar test scores to those from Cornwall.

WRT the Danubian dairy farmers, is there a proposed route to the Isles after the Danube? Was it north via the Rhine or west into France, or something else. I did look at your site but couldn't find anything.

You won't find anything on my site that is going into the book. My suggestion is that after the first wave of farmers into Central Europe (the LBK) another wave followed who were dairy farmers. They seem to have moved up the Danube to form the Rössen culture. From part of that region springs the Michelsberg culture, which is a possible source for the British and Irish Neolithic.